#Metamorphoses scansion first 9 lines full#

There’s also Agamemnon’s remarkable speech in book 19, which involves the only mutli-line embedded direct speech in the Iliad so we need tags for speaker-inside-speaker. I have speakers tagged, but addressees would be good, as would speaker metadata (gender, human/god, god-in-disguise-as, god-in-dream, person-as-ghost etc.), speech type (prayer, supplication, flyting etc.). I’d like to add more semantic info to the files at some point, perhaps working with treebank data.And I am a rhythmically challenged person, so I need to consult with a drummer friend or two. When I pause at a caesura, the pause length is consistent (for the most part) no matter the place of the caesura in the rhythm. This means, among other things, that there is always a line-end pause before an enjambed word. I give each line 8 beats, so the rhythm is perfectly stichic, however the caesura is treated. The basic rhythmic framework of my reading has some major assumptions.It may not be necessary to be, but we’ll see.

I’ve not been consistent in those decisions so far. elision, lengthening and hiatus at the caesura all require decisions about pronunciation.phrasing of enjambment and treatment of caesura seem to me to be linked.In any case, it’s linked to the next one: It may represent a useful intuition, or it may just be a bad habit. I’m averse to 4th foot caesuras, generally opting to read without pause or to pause at a weak 3rd foot word break rather than observe them.If you’ve been listening, you’ll have noticed a few things about the way I treat caesuras.Or I may need to decide if I’m reading an 8th century poem or a 3rd century text. Consistency may not be necessary, but there may be some patterns to be discovered here. The more I read, the less I pronounced them, but a few still seemed necessary.

I’m inconsistent on digamma pronunciation.

I’m probably also letting the stress accent come through too much.

#Metamorphoses scansion first 9 lines full#

I have no plans to go full Daitz on this.

I’m getting better at the pitch accent (I think), but it would be good to do some more work on it before restarting.

It still seems to me that Homer’s audience would have appreciated a little variety of pace, so I’ll see if I can revisit that. I abandoned this quickly for the sake of simplicity, and because I wasn’t happy with the way I was doing it.

with a few early books of the Iliad I experimented with varying the pace of reading.

Before I move on to the Odyssey, however, I need to meditate on some slightly less basic things, do a few experiments, and see if I can produce something a bit more sophisticated.

a tolerable effort at reconstructed pronunciation (to the extent that it exists for Homeric Greek) with a very conservative pitch accent, and with my instinctive stress accent restrained to the best of my ability.

a recognizable, consistent hexameter rhythm.

Accordingly I’ve tried to follow only a couple of very basic requirements: The aim so far has been to produce, in a reasonable time period, a free, accessible, spoken version, with moderately good audio quality and linked to a metrically tagged text. These are also posted to in various downloadable formats.